Are They or Aren't They?

Balthus: Cats and Girls

A few years before his death, the French painter Balthasar Klossowski (1908-2001), better known as Balthus, was asked by the journalist Françoise Jaunin about his first artistic memory.

He recalled being an 8-year-old and adopting a stray cat, whom he named Mitsou. Adored and pampered, the animal made herself at home on the beds and tables of his family's Paris apartment. He would take her for walks on a leash. Then one day, without warning, she vanished.

To memorialize the loss, the 11-year-old did a series of drawings ("I wept tears of black ink," he told Ms. Jaunin) that his mother showed to her friend (and later lover) Rainer Maria Rilke. So impressed was the great German poet by the boy's talent that he offered to write a preface and support what became the book "Mitsou," published in Leipzig when Baltusz (as the original title page reads) was 13.

The 40 drawings for this charming tale are being exhibited for the first time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in "Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations." Displayed in vitrines, in a separate room midway through the show, the "Mitsou" drawings are more than curiosities. They precociously announce themes—the inconsolable sadness of youth, the opacity of other beings—that would engage the adult artist.

The narrative hooks and settings of domestic order that the adolescent Balthus put to good use in his story are the same ones found in his 34 paintings of adolescent girls in the rest of this compact show. The curator, Sabine Rewald, doesn't speculate on the lasting psychological effects the abandonment might have had, but her title suggests the link between cats and girls was not the sort usually seen in children's books.

Any honest look at Balthus has to figure out how to address his preoccupation with young women. The museum treats a delicate legal situation sensibly and head on. There is a small warning label on the right as one walks into the first gallery, where eight portraits of Thérèse Blanchard are presented. It reads that "some of the paintings in this exhibition may be disturbing to some visitors." Other than that, we are allowed to make up our own minds about what is going on in these scenes, painted between 1936 and 1939, when she was 11 to 14 years old.

Still, Ms. Rewald in her catalog essay isn't buying the notion, perpetuated by Balthus, that only repressed Americans view these works as erotic. You don't have to be a prude to detect a pornographic subtext in his early works. In two of them, Thérèse sits with eyes closed, legs apart and white underpants exposed.

In this light, the decision to exclude "The Guitar Lesson" was prudent. This infamous 1934 painting of an older woman fondling a half-naked young girl on her lap was intended by the 26-year-old to shock the Paris art world. (It did, in a scandal that Balthus later regretted.) Were this work on the walls, not confined to the catalog, it would have invited trouble and overwhelmed everything else.

The portraits of Thérèse are not as explicit. Balthus keeps her fully clothed and buttoned up, and often seats her on hard-backed furniture against somber backgrounds. She does not smile. The descriptive weight of paint, which Balthus admired in the serene work of Piero della Francesca, is as central to the picture as the artist's imagining a girl's sexual awakening.

When totaling Balthus's sins and virtues, one shouldn't discount the strength of the young women in his paintings. None are frail or helpless. All seem noticeably more powerful than the artist, whose dandified 1935 self-portrait, "The King of Cats," shares a room with the Thérèse portraits. (The title is a nickname given to him early on by friends. He identified so completely with cats that he even claimed he attracted women when young by emitting an odor of musk.)

It's the tension between neo-classical formalism and hot-button content that makes Balthus so perplexing. Although he had revered the Old Masters in the Louvre and detested the predictable gaucheries of Surrealism, he himself fell back on voyeurist clichés (the young woman dreamily offering herself to our gaze) and porn. A whip on a stool in "King of Cats" is not a prop seen in self-portraits by Nicolas Poussin.

What is gratifying about Balthus's career, at least in this abbreviated version—Ms. Rewald stops the chronology in 1960—is that he matured. As his compositions grew more ambitious and included more figures ("The Salon I," 1943) sexuality became only one symbolic element, and not always the main one.

In "The Golden Days" (1946), he has reclined another 14-year-old girl on a sofa, loosened the top of her dress, given her a hand mirror, and supercharged the scene by adding an adult male to tend a roaring fire. If his former prurience never entirely disappeared, it's muted now by the interlocking lines and ovals of the bodies, furniture and mantelpiece. Pale light from a window on the left cools the blazing orange of the flames on the right.

By the last gallery, as his palette lightens and a Matisse-like patterning dominates ("Golden Afternoon," 1957; "The Cup of Coffee," 1960), the bodies of his young women are plump, irregular, awkward, normal. The nude in "The Moth" (1960) is no longer a male fantasy but like a medieval virgin. Her right arm makes a hieratic gesture, as though blessing the fluttery creature drawn to her bedside lamp.

His cats are always independent creatures. They can be playful but are more often demonic in their secret watchfulness. "The Cat of La Méditerranée," done in 1949 for the wall of a Paris seafood restaurant, is his most ferocious feline self-portrait. From a rainbow over a harbor, an arc of fish arrives on the plate of a cat-man that stares at us with teeth bared and a sharp knife and fork in his hands. (It can't be said that Balthus didn't have a sense of humor about his appetites.)

There are notable exceptions to the gradual cheeriness of the show. "The Victim," a monumental canvas of a reclining nude girl, who seems to have been killed (or killed herself?) with a knife beneath her bed, took him seven years (1939-46) to complete. Whether or not she is an allegory of France during World War II, her sprawled body and half-open eyes have a disquieting lividity not found elsewhere here.

This choice selection of works proves that Balthus never forgot what he had discovered as an 11-year-old: How despair and momentary pleasures could be enlarged into material for art. In the last panels of "Mitsou," the boy—after searching for his missing cat under beds and in the street—realizes she will never return and, standing alone in his room, cannot stop crying.

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